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I have had difficulty with using tags correctly and effectively.

Allow me to give an example:

When asking a question about tefilla betzibbur, which tags should be employed? The tag describes this question perfectly, so ideally that would be the correct tag. However, the and are equally relevant, although slightly higher on the hierarchical chain.

It seems absurd to employ all three tags, because is simply the crossover of and ; everything tagged by it should automatically be included in its two parent tags. (For example, if one searches , something under should automatically be included as a subcategory.)

The problem is, both are necessary. On one hand, the more specific, the better the tag is. On the other hand, more general tags also have an advantage of being more inclusive (like when browsing, for example).

The same thing applies across the board - there are many specific standalone tags which are in reality just subcategories of more general tags. Is there any way to label subcategories to automatically be included in their parent class?

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In my opinion, if one tag is hierarchically lower than (a hyponym of) another, then both should not be applied to a question. For clarity, I'll use an example: . It's a hyponym of and therefore also of and therefore also of and therefore, possibly, also of . Surely not every question tagged should be tagged with all of those! Rather, should be for questions that are about the book per se, not questions that are about a particular part of the book that's in Balak; likewise, should be for questions that are about Tanach per se, not a part of it that's in a particular book (if the book has a tag). Thus for example "When was Tanach first published in one volume?" should be tagged .

One exception, where a hyponym and its hypernym should both be on a question, is where there's an aspect of the question that's about the hypernym (broader tag) per se. For example, "So-and-so says the book of Numbers contains allusions, in order, to every book of Tanach. Where are they?" should be tagged both and .

Just MHO.

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    I wrestle with this problem most often on questions about Shabbat and/or Yom Tov. Maybe they're about t'filah, or eiruvim, or melacha, or candle-lighting... but they're also about Shabbat and most questions about Shabbat also apply to Yom Tov. Possibly the answer is to make sure the tag wikis are good and cross-link other relevant tags? – Monica Cellio Jul 22 '19 at 18:42
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    I agree that this is generally best practice given the tagging system we have. I would prefer, however, for, e.g., queries for bamidbar-numbers-book-of to automatically also turn up anything tagged for the sedrot thereof, and so on. That way, if I'm interested in questions that, let's say, discuss how Nach affects Halacha regarding Sukkot, I'd query for the intersection of exactly those three tags and be reasonably sure that I'd get a superset of the questions I'm looking for. – Isaac Moses♦ Jul 22 '19 at 21:25
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    @IsaacMoses I agree completely with your comment and was writing only as a BCP given the situation. – msh210♦ Jul 22 '19 at 21:50
  • This works well in your example because the relationship between parshios and the sefarim they appear in is not very pronounced. Most questions about a parshah aren't truly about the sefer; it just happens to be that the parshah is in that particular sefer. But in other cases, such as the one in the question here, the question is very much about the broader tags as well. A question about tefilah betzibur is certainly a question about tefilah, even as a question about Parshas Balak is not really about Sefer Bamidbar. – Alex Jan 27 '20 at 0:16

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